July 31st, 2012

WE ARE THE DICK MILLER APPRECIATION SOCIETY…

Firstly, apologies if you are having trouble downloading this week’s SILENCE! Gary and The Beast are currently reaching their monthly bandwidth limit with their pod lords. It should be back to normal (at least for a while) on the 4th of August. At the moment they cannot afford to upgrade our account so perhaps they’ll set up some way of letting listeners chip in a bit of financial support in the near future but what do I know? I’m just a disembodied voice which magically appears here to tell you about the contents of the podcast…

Secondly – forget about all that whiny cry-baby sh*t! Let’s get some face time with the latest and greatest edition of SILENCE! – the show that snuggles up to you and looks awful cute, but one look into those cold black shark eyes tells you…this podcast is not your friend.

The Beast and Lactus get things up and running (then falling over) with the SILENCE! News, before taking a roll in the clover with some of this week’s very floppiest of floppies, including:

Axe Cop, Tank Girl from Martin and Mahfood, Eternity, Haunt, Prophet and JL: Dark. Lactus bites down on the belt strap and mainlines some more medicine in Man Vs Comics, taking on all sorts of unwanted AVX business in Wolverine and The X-Men, X-Men Legacy and AVX: The Avengers. There are probably more in there too. Beast also likes some of Paul Chadwick’s Concrete.

The two get another celebrity quizzler in The Silent Question (and the answers involve Booster Gold and Jason Todd). Lactus continues his crusade to bring exposure to lost Brit comics savant Barry M Freeman, and The Beast unveils his Knightquest, as he dips into the Complete Batman: Knightfall. Oh, and Lactus unveils his headpourings on the ‘recent’ Amazing Spiderman film.

All wrapped up in an hour and a half of well proportioned comics fun. And look at the winning smile on the little blighter! So gather round and listen to Pappy as he turns up the radio on…SILENCE! no.24!

Also, world shattering threats get tiresome very quickly. I’d rather see super types wrestle with an unhappy shareholder or a posessed George Foreman grill than a malevolent force beyond all human comprehension. There’s more room for stories to move in the smaller stuff.

Glad to hear the Beast is enjoying Concrete! It almost goes without saying that the art’s lovely but it’s also one of the most personal comics I’ve ever read and the level of research into his ‘real world’ adventures is as good as Tin Tin or Asterix. The issue when he goes to see his mum on her deathbed is in my top ten favourite comics ever. I also like the way it wades into the ‘Thing about the Thing’s thing’ debate…

As a non-reader of Axe Cop you both explained it nicely and – to me – it feels like you can get your laughs from it but if you really wanted to you could bring a level of study to it. Just appreciating the process of synthesis on these ideas between two brothers in and of itself could be worthwhile.

For example, pretty uncommon to have such an age difference between siblings, right? I don’t doubt the younger one is often trying to impress his older brother who does this utterly cool thing with him. To think about how that influences the kid and how, perhaps, his much older brother might try to edit that or enhance it is quite interesting on its own.

Multiple readings and good laughs seems like a perfect prescription, these days. Any day, really.

On Booster Gold it seems like the click point for the old JLI was that it was a push/pull relationship team book. Straight-laced superheroes like the Martian Manhunter and Batman being placed in close proximity to “weekend warriors” like Booster, Beetle, and Fire led to good character stuff. We figured out J’onn had a soft spot for Oreos and occasionally Booster found the hero within. It meant more to see them rise to the music or fuck about arguing the terms of a lease agreement when characters didn’t seem so one note (BLASTING!) or so constantly wrapped up in one long funeral dirge for LIFE AS WE KNOW IT!

As always, thanks for the effort and the free listening. If you have some nothing swag or a no prize I’d be more than happy to contribute to ease your bandwith woes. It is better for conservation purposes to d/l from iTunes, right?

As I’ve said elsewhere, Axe Cop is an experience that’s familiar to any adult who’s spent time playing games with little kids. It’s not just funny, it’s also startling and refreshing in its strangeness.

The whole BatBaneBackBreak storyline is maybe my favourite Bat-story? Nostalgia’s a large part of that, but the whole build-up of Batman being knackered then getting his spine snapped up a treat is really effective. It’s about the only non-Elseworlds 90s Bat-stuff I’ve read and loved.

I only recently read volume 3 of the collections, and was incredibly bemused to find they’d entirely skipped how exactly it was that Batman healed his back. Maybe he got hung from a roof and had his spine punched back into place?

Just got Axe Cop! Funniest and most inspired comic I’ve read in ages! I suppose it’s like the comic equivalent of that telly show ‘Outnumbered’, (where the kids improvise their parts) but less smug / irritating and with added robot penguins…

I enjoyed Prophet as always, but this artist is easily my least favorite of the bunch, and he is doing the next issue as well. Really in a perfect world I’d just want Roy and Graham doing all of the art. Still, the art is still more than good.